Dear Terry,

This post is not a challenge to any specific view you hold on neuroscience. Rather, this is a challenge to the presumed expertise on which you seem to base your argumentation to this list. In post after post on numerous topics, you havechallenged serious and responsible researchers based on appeals to neuroscience. In many of these days, you have stated that we are mired in illusion, false beliefs, outdated information, or prejudice, and for this reason, we cannot understand your worldview and the statements that you base on current research in neuroscience. This is an appeal to expert opinion.

Most of us agree that the opinion of an acknowledged expert in a research field is credible.This is the basis on which courts determine the credibility of an expert witness before allowing expert testimony. This is why universities require selection committees to include professors and experts in the field for which an appointment will be made. Many universities also require selection committees to have an external member from another field. These must be senior academics with a deep enough understanding of research to evaluate research qualifications. This is also the basis on which grant reviewers make judgments.

When someone from a field outside their home field enters a new field, we expect careful and robust argument with carefully cited evidence. I compose posts to this list carefully because design is an interdisciplinary field. Because we have expert readers from many home disciplines, the standard for argumentation should be higher rather than lower. This is why I generally try to make an argument within the body of a post while providing careful references to external evidence. The argument within a post applies the evidence to the issues at hand.

Your arguments on neuroscience have generally been opinions based on what you consider to be your own work in neuroscience over the past ten years. You have rarely bothered to make a proper argument, and never a well-written argument properly referenced. Because of your repeated references to research and documentation, I infer that you believe your opinion to be expert opinion, or at least informed opinion. In my view, this is not the case.

If we were hiring a post-doctoral research fellow in neuroscience, we’d expect a relevant PhD, a few conference papers and a journal article or two. If we were hiring a lecturer, we’d expect a few more journal articles. For a senior lecturer in an establish research field such as neuroscience or the allied fields of psychology, we’d expect a serious record of research and publishing. Having served on university-wide promotion rounds, I can state that we’d certainly expect this for promotion.

The fact that you do not publish in neuroscience or work in neuroscience is a challenge to your expertise. Private reading in neuroscience is different to work that anyone in the field of neuroscience would recognize.

At the same time, you have not provided well-structured arguments to the list supported by carefully referenced evidence. When you provide evidence, you generally provide a stack of links without stating the issues or showing how these referencesbear on the issues at hand.

This seems to me an unsatisfactory way of arguing. I am not addressing any specific argument you have put forward. Rather, I am challenging your expertise and I am challenging your ability to judge what aspects of neuroscience genuinely apply to the issues you raise here. I will post a note in July or August stating my views on neuroscience with respect to design. At that time, I will explain my challenge to the our claims in the earlier post. Here, I differentiate between expertopinion and lay opinion.

You have repeatedly challenged excellent researchers on different issues, basing your challenge on claims to expertise in neuroscience. This has been a repeated claim on this list. In each case, you make references to your work and to the field. You have never shown your work in the field of neuroscience or demonstrated that you work in the field.

If you’re going to make claims in neuroscience, I’d like to know the basis of your claim to expertise. This is different to challenge any specific argument. I’m questioning your repeated challenges to leading design scholars based on neuroscience rather than fields where others here have equal or superior claims to expertise – including fields such as philosophy, sociology, psychology, or mathematics.

You do not publish in neuroscience. You have never published an article in a peer-reviewed neuroscience journal. You have never presented a paper at a peer-reviewed neuroscience conference. Your conference papers are presentations to designconferences stating your opinions about neuroscience. The peer-reviewed papers are generally reviewed by studio design teachers – with the possible exception of your paper at a Design and Emotion conference.

If you want to make a properly argued case based on the sound argument from evidence that you ask from the rest of us, I would not be challenging your expertise. As it is, you repeatedly wiggle around any challenges with an argument that can only be based on expertise – or at least on a high level of informed opinion.

On one occasion past, I asked about the basis of your expertise, and I inquired about your publications in the field of neuroscience. You answer was that you have done “some pretty full time exploration of the application of neuro-science to theories of design cognition for 10 years or so,” adding that you publish “only a small amount” of what you get involved in. If you published in neuroscience, it would make sense that you publish “only a small amount” of your neuroscience research. A decade of full-time exploration by a researcher should lead to peer-reviewed findings. So far, I can’t see that you publish at all.

Most of us on the list do our best to offer reasoned argumentation. Some of us provide evidence, others simply argue well, or try to. Neuroscience is a physical science, linked both to psychology and to physiology. An expert appeal to neuroscience might therefore trump the rest of us, as we are limited in general to reasoned opinions based on other grounds than the natural sciences or statistically and empirically validated fields such as psychology or physiology. If an expert in neuroscience were to tell me my views were illusory views that “privilege” [x], [y], or [z] as against the empirically validated findings of neuroscience, I’d be concerned. So far, that hasn’t happened. If you’re going to challenge the rest of us with a form of argumentation based on expert opinion and research findings, I’d like to know the basis of your claims.

How are we to distinguish your opinions about neuroscience from the opinions of any person that not work in the field of neuroscience? On what basis should we accept your opinion as expert – or even well informed?

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask] |Phone +61 3 9214 6102 | http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design




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